summary of Plan 9 BOF (birds of a feather session)

[Steve Kotsopoulos steve@ecf.toronto.edu]

I scheduled a Plan 9 BOF at the Usenix conference last week.
About 40 people attended, but only a few had Plan 9.
Many of the others were either from commercial organizations
(and wish they could get it), or from universities without licences.
We were pleased that Rob Pike and Dennis Ritchie were able to attend.

I started the BOF by telling people how they could obtain licences, and
pointed them to the ftp archive on research.att.com for more information.
I also said that I was thinking of setting up my own ftp server, to
collect sources from the user community. I feel there may be some users
out there who have written software, but haven't made it available
to others because they don't have an anonymous ftp server.

If anyone has something they would like to make available to all the
other Plan 9 licencees, please send me mail. I'll post a notice to 
this list once the ftp service is online.

After the preliminary remarks, Rob Pike was kind enough to answer
a wide variety of questions. I'll summarize what I remember:

A new Plan 9 distribution will be worked on this summer, but it is unclear
if it will be distributed. Please don't deluge the developers for more
information regarding the licencing and release details.

It will have acme and a fax service, and updated versions of alef, acid &
authenticaion services.  The PC kernel now supports sound boards.
The default porting base will be for PC's instead of Sparcs and Magnums.
If legal details can be worked out, the Plan 9 developers hope that this
CD will also be released publicly, so that anyone can buy it
(again, this is what they HOPE ... no promises).

Brazil is their current research project. It looks like Plan 9 on the
outside, but there have been many internal changes. Most importantly,
the kernel data paths have been shortened to improve throughput.
Rob re-wrote the window system for Brazil in alef (in 4 days).

Someone asked "why do we need another new language [alef]?"
Rob explained that alef is a concurrent object-oriented language,
and this makes it much easier to write some kinds of programs.
Two examples were given.  The fax package has a coroutine that loads
the next page of fax while you are reading the current page. This
was relatively easy to add in with alef.
Also, for programs like the window system, which manage several different
input and output devices, alef makes the program smaller and easier
to write (once you've mastered concurrent programming).

A new audio compression algorithm has been developed by the acoustics
researchers at Bell Labs. It gives 13:1 compression (mpeg gives 4:1).
A new network has been developed by Phil Winterbottom.
It is called Planet (built with PLA's), and can handle 300Mb/s.

Many of the questions had to do with licencing ... I don't recall
any details other than what I have already written.

For more information:

ftp  research.att.com:/dist/plan9doc	Plan 9: The Early Papers
ftp  research.att.com:/dist/plan9man	manuals & licencing information
ftp  nine.ecf.toronto.edu:/pub/plan9	user community ftp site - soon

mail 9fans-owner@cse.psu.edu		to subscribe to mailing list
--
	Steve